The Greek's Forced Bride

‘I won’t,’ Leo promised.

‘I h-hate him. I never want to see him again.’

‘I will not let him in,’ he repeated gently.

But Rico called out her name again hoarse with emotion and Leo felt her fingernails dig into the back of his neck while the two of them listened to his housekeeper make some stern response.

‘My heart’s beating so fast I can’t breathe properly,’ Natasha whispered breathlessly.

A spark of challenge lit Leo’s eyes. He should have contained it—he knew that even as he murmured the challenging, ‘I can make it beat faster.’

If he’d said it to distract her attention away from Rico, it certainly worked when her mouth parted on a surprised little gasp. Leo raised a ruefully mocking eyebrow, feeling the buzz, the loin heating, sex-charging, challenging buzz.

And he leant in and claimed her mouth.

It was like falling into an electrified pit, Natasha likened dizzily as not a single part or inch of her missed out on the high-voltage rush. She’d never experienced anything like it. He crushed her lips to keep them parted, then slid his tongue into her mouth. The sheer shock feel of that alien wet contact stroking across her own tongue made her shiver with pleasure, then stiffen in shock. He did it again and this time she whimpered.

Leo murmured something, then slid his arms around her so he could draw her closer to him and deepen the kiss. The next few seconds went by in a fevered hot rush. She felt plastered against his muscled torso. She could hear Rico shouting. Something hard and ridged was pushing against her front. The wildly disturbing recognition of what that something was sent her deaf to everything else as her own senses bloomed with an excited sparkle in response.

It was crazy, she tried telling herself. She didn’t even like Leo Christakis yet here she was drowning in the full on power of his heated kiss! In all of her life she had never kissed anyone like this—never felt even remotely like this! It was like throwing herself against a rock only to discover that the rock had magical powers. His hand skated the length of her spine to her waist, then pressed her even closer, at the same time that he increased the pressure on her mouth, sending her neck arching backwards as he used his tongue to create a warm, thick chain reaction that poured through her entire body like silk.

Natasha heard herself groan something. He muttered a very low, sensual rasp in response. Then Rico called out to her again, harsh and angry enough to pierce into her foggy consciousness, and she wrenched her mouth free.

Trembling and panting with her heart pounding wildly, she stared up at this man while her mind fed her an image of the way Rico had been enjoying Cindy across his desk.

As if her sister knew what she was thinking, her phone began to ring in her purse.

The scald of betrayal burned her up on the inside.

‘For God’s sake, Natasha, let me talk to you!’ Rico’s rasping voice ground out.

Revenge lit her up.

Leo saw it happen and knew exactly where it was coming from. Sanity returned to him with a gut-crushing whoosh. She was going to offer herself to him, but did he want her like this, bruised and heartbroken and throbbing with a desire for revenge on Rico, who could easily charge in here and catch them?

As they had walked into Rico’s office and caught him.

Natasha leant away from Leo and began unbuttoning her jacket with shakily fumbling, feverish fingers.

Leo released a sigh. ‘You don’t want to do this, Natasha,’ he said heavily.

‘Don’t tell me what I don’t want,’ she shook out.

The two pieces of fabric were wrenched apart to reveal a white top made of some stretchy fabric that crossed over and moulded the thrusting fullness of her two tight breasts.

Leo looked down at them, then up into her fever-bright eyes, and wanted to bite out a filthy black curse. As she wrenched the jacket off altogether, he reached out to try and stop her, only to freeze when he read the helpless plea that had etched itself on her paper-white face.

If he turned her down now, the rejection was going to shatter her.

Her smooth white throat moved as she swallowed, those kiss-warmed lips parting so she could whisper out a husky little, ‘Please…’

And he was lost, Leo knew it. Even as she took the initiative away from him by winding her arms around his neck again, he knew he was not going to stop this. Lifting his hands up to mould her ribcage, he stroked them down the tight white fabric to the sexy indentation of her waist in an exploring act that rolled back the denials still beating an urgent tattoo in his head.

Her mouth was a hungry invite. Leo raked his hands back up her body again and this time covered the full perfect globes of her breasts. She fell apart on a series of gasps and quivers that sent her body into an acute sensual arch, fingernails digging into his neck again, hair suddenly tumbling free in a glorious roll of fine silken waves down her back. She was amazing, a stunningly complicated mix of prim, straight-lace and pure untrammelled passion with her lily-white skin and her lush parted mouth, and her breasts two sensational mounds that filled his hands and…

The front door slammed.

Rico had gone.

If Natasha recognised what the sound meant she did not make a response. Her eyes still burned into him with the fevered invitation she was offering.

Time to make a decision, Leo accepted grimly. Continue this or put a stop to it?

Then her fingernails dug deeper to pull his mouth back down onto hers and the decision was made for him.

Natasha felt his surrender and took it with a leap of triumph that bordered on the mad. She became aware of the power of his erection pressing against her again, instinct made her move against it. He muttered a low, throaty response and he was suddenly tightening his hold of her and drawing her to her feet. Next he was swinging her up into his arms and carrying her, the kiss still a seething hot fuse that frazzled her brain and had her heart pounding to the beat of his footsteps echoing on oak flooring as he headed across the hall and began climbing the stairs.

It was the moment that Natasha saw a small chink of sanity. Her head went back, rending the kiss apart as she opened her eyes to look deep into Leo Christakis’s heavily lidded dark eyes before she glanced around her as if she’d been woken up suddenly from a dream.

It was only then that she realised that the hallway was empty. No one was there. No Rico witnessing his betrayed fiancée being carried to bed by her soon-to-be new lover. No housekeeper containing her disapproval and shock.

‘Changed your mind now you don’t have a witness?’ Leo’s hard voice swung her eyes back to him again.

He’d gone still on one of the stairs and the look of cold cynicism was back, lashing his skin to the bones in his face.

‘No,’ Natasha breathed, and she discovered that she meant it. She wanted to do this. She wanted to be carried to bed and made love to by a man who genuinely wanted her—she wanted to lose every single old-fashioned and disgustingly outmoded inhibition she possessed!

‘Please,’ she breathed softly as she leant in to brush a kiss across the hard line of his mouth. ‘Make love to me, Leo.’

There was another moment of hesitation, a glimpse of fury in the depths of his eyes. Then he was moving again, allowing her to breathe again though she had not been aware of holding her breath. He finished the climb up the stairs and carried her into a sultry summer-warmed bedroom with pale walls and big dark pieces of furniture. A red Persian rug covered most of the polished oak floor.

Then he really shocked her by dumping her unceremoniously on the top of a huge soft bed.

As Natasha lay there blinking up at him Leo stood looking down at her, his expression as hard and cynical as hell. ‘Stay there and pull yourself together,’ was all he uttered before he turned around to walk back to the door.

‘Why?’ Natasha shook out.

‘I will not play substitute to any man,’ the cold brute answered.

Natasha sat up. ‘Y-you said you wanted me.’

‘Strange—’ he turned, his kiss-heated mouth taking on a scornful twist ‘—but seeing you getting off on the possibility of Rico witnessing us together was a real turn off for me.’

Natasha sat up with a jolt. ‘I was not getting off on it—!’

‘Liar,’ he lashed back, then really startled her by striding back to the bed to come and lean over her—close enough to make her blink warily because she just didn’t know what was going to come next.

‘To keep things clear between us, Natasha,’ he murmured silkily, ‘if you loved what we were doing downstairs so much you forgot all about Rico, then ask yourself what that tells me about Miss Betrayed and Broken-hearted, hmm—?’

It was as good as a cold, hard slap in the face. Natasha just stared up at him because the worst thing of all was that he had only told it how it was! She had been thinking about Rico when she’d invited what she had downstairs. And she had no excuse for the way she had begged him to bring her up here!

But had he behaved any better? ‘You cruel, h-hateful swine,’ she breathed, and pulled up her knees so she could bury her face.

Leo agreed. He was behaving like an absolute beast feeding her all the blame for whatever had erupted in both of them downstairs. It was still erupting inside him, he admitted as he turned away again and strode back to the door, wishing that he had stayed in Athens this morning instead of…

Telephones started ringing again, piercing through the high-octane atmosphere—his phone in his jacket pocket and another phone ringing somewhere else in the house. Retrieving his mobile, Leo glared at the display screen, expecting it to show Rico’s name.

But it was Juno, his PA. Leo sanctioned the connection. ‘This had better be important,’ he warned as he stepped out of the bedroom and pulled the door shut.

Natasha lifted her head at the sound of the door snapping into its housing. He’d gone. He’d left her sitting here in a huddle on his bed and just walked away from her—because he could.

On a sudden pummelling punch of self-hatred she scrambled up off the bed, hurt beyond sense that yet another man had humiliated her in the space of one horrible day.

Oh, she had to get out of here! Natasha almost screeched that need at herself as she looked around the floor for her shoes and couldn’t find them. Then she remembered the vague echo of them falling off her feet and hitting the floor when Leo had picked her up. Her hair fell forward, tumbling in long waves around her face as if to taunt how she’d been so wrapped up in what she’d been doing with him that she hadn’t even noticed before now how her hair had sprung free of its restraints!

Like herself. She shuddered, turning like a drunk not knowing where she was going and heading for the door. She made it out onto the landing and even found her way back down the stairs without coming face to face with anyone else. The door to the living room still hung wide-open and the wretched tears almost broke free when she saw the way her jacket lay in a pale blue swish of fabric on the floor by the chair she had been sitting on before she…

Swallowing, she hurried forward to snatch up the offending garment, pulling it on and fastening it up while she scrambled her feet into her shoes.

He arrived in the doorway, lounging there and filling it with his lean, dark, overbearing presence and…

Her phone started to ring in her purse.

With what tiny bit of control she had left, Natasha bent down to scoop up the purse, then dragged the phone out with trembling fingers and just slammed the wafer-thin piece of shiny black plastic forcefully down on the floor.

It stopped ringing.

The sudden rush of silence throbbed like the beat of a drum in her head, and the tears were really threatening now like hot, sharp shards of flaming glass hitting the backs of her eyes and her throat. She spun towards the door to find Leo was still there, blocking her only exit.

Her mouth began to work, fighting—fighting the tears. ‘Please,’ she pushed out at him on a thick broken whisper. ‘I need you to move out of my way so I can leave.’

Silence. He said nothing. He did not attempt to move. His eyes were half hooded, his lips straight and tight. And there was just enough narrow-eyed insolence in the way he was casually standing there with his arms folded across his front like that to make Natasha realise that something about him had altered dramatically.

‘W-what—?’ she shook out.

Leo wondered how she would react if he accused her of being a play-acting little thief?

‘I am just curious,’ he posed very levelly. ‘Leave here for where?’

But inside he didn’t feel level in any other way. Inside he was feeling so conned he didn’t know how he was managing to hold it all in!

Rico’s little accomplice—who would have thought it? Apparently Miss Cool and Prim was not so prim when it came to letting her greedy, grasping, slender fingers scoop up the cash Rico had stolen from him!

‘To find Rico, perhaps?’ he suggested when she didn’t say anything.

‘No!’ She even managed to shudder. ‘H-home,’ she said, ‘to my apartment.’

‘You don’t have your keys.’

‘I’ll get the janitor to let me in.’

‘Or your loving sister,’ Leo provided. ‘I predict she is already there, waiting to pounce on you the moment that you arrive.’

Was the other sister in on the scam, too?

And look at this one, he thought as he shuttered his eyes that bit more before running them down her front. She was back to being buttoned up to the throat as if the passionate interlude they’d just shared had never taken place—if you didn’t count the flowing hair and the flush on her cheeks and the kiss-swollen bloom on her lips that he had put there.

‘What does it matter to you if she is?’ Natasha asked. ‘This was never your problem,’ she informed him stiffly. ‘You should not have become involved. I don’t even know why you did or why you had to bring me here at all!’

‘You needed a safe place to recover,’ Leo said dryly.

‘Safe?’ Natasha choked out. ‘You’d barely dragged me through your front door before you were coming on to me!’

His careless shrug shot Natasha into movement, wanting, needing to get away from the insufferable devil so badly now she was prepared to risk the feeble strength in her shaky legs to walk towards him—aware of the way his eyes followed her every footstep—aware that at any second now she was going to fall down in a screaming hot puddle of tears on the floor.

And still he did not move out of her way so she could get out of here, so the closer she came to him, the more her senses went wild, fluttering in protest in case he dared to touch her again—and at the same time fizzing with excitement in the hope that he did!

I don’t know myself any more, Natasha thought helplessly. ‘Move,’ she demanded, resorting to a bit of his own blunt way of speech.

The slight tug his mouth gave was an acknowledgement of it, but he didn’t shift. ‘You cannot leave,’ he coolly informed her.

Was he mad? ‘Of course I can go.’ Shoulders tense, Natasha tried to push him out of her way by placing her hands on his chest. It didn’t happen. It was like trying to move a fully grown tree, and in the end Leo caught up her fingers to lift them away from his chest.

‘When I said you cannot leave, Natasha, I meant it,’ he informed her very seriously. ‘At least not until the police arrive to take you away, that is…’

CHAPTER THREE

NATASHA froze for a second. Then, ‘The police?’ she edged out blankly.

‘The Fraud Squad, to be more accurate,’ Leo confirmed.

‘Fraud…?’

His mouth gave a twitch at the way she kept on echoing him. ‘As in swindler and charlatan,’ he provided, driving his gaze down her body as if to say the crime was that she looked the way she did yet could turn on so hotly the way she had.

Natasha quivered, her cheeks turning pink with shamed embarrassment. ‘I don’t usually…’

‘Turn on for a man just to pull the wool over his eyes…?’

Untangling her fingers from his, she fell back a couple of steps and really looked at him, catching on at last that he was leading somewhere with this that she was not going to like.

‘Since I don’t have a single clue what it is you’re trying to get at, I think you had better explain,’ Natasha prompted finally.

‘Does that mean you do want to go to bed with me and it is not a sham act?’

Natasha tensed, lips parting then closing again, because the true answer to that taunt was just not going to happen. ‘I was in shock when I—’

‘In a state of fright, more like,’ he interrupted, ‘as to what Rico had done to all your plans, with his crass bit on the desk today.’

‘Plans for what?’ Lifting a hand into her hair, she pushed the tumbling mass back from her angrily bewildered face. ‘I was planning to marry him—well, there’s one plan gone down the tubes,’ she choked out. ‘And as you’ve just kindly pointed out to me, I caught him having sex with my own sister—so there’s my pride gone the same way along with any love for my sister!’ The hand dropped to fold along with the other hand tight across her front. ‘Then I surrendered to some mad desire to be wanted by anybody and you happened to be in the right place at the right time,’ she pushed on, ‘but that was just another plan sent off down the tubes when you changed your mind about w-wanting me!’

‘And now your carefully creamed nest egg is about to go the same way,’ Leo added without a hint of sympathy. ‘So I would say that you are having a very bad day, today, Natasha. A very bad day indeed.’

‘Nest egg?’ Natasha picked up. ‘What is it you are talking about now?’

Wearing that smile on his lips that she didn’t like, Leo levered himself away from the doorframe and moved away, leaving her to turn and watch as he headed for the drinks cabinet.

He needed something strong, Leo decided as he poured neat whisky into a glass. He took a good slug, then turned back to look at her, ‘I have just been talking to my PA,’ he enlightened. ‘Juno has been very busy investigating where Rico stashed the money he stole from me and has managed to trace it to an offshore bank account in your name, so lose the bemused expression, Natasha. I’m on to you….’

Nothing happened. She didn’t gasp, she didn’t faint, she didn’t jump in with a flood of denials or excuses aimed to defend what it was he was talking about now. Instead, Leo stood there and watched while something cold struck into him because there it was, the dawning of honesty taking over her lying, cheating, paling face.

That mouth was still a killer though, he observed—and slammed the glass down, suddenly blisteringly angry with himself for being so easily duped by her challengingly prim disguise!

‘I think you had better sit down before you fall down,’ he advised her flatly.

And she did, which only helped to feed his anger all the more. The flowing-haired witch dropped like a stone into the nearest chair, then covered her guilty face with her light-fingered thieving hands!

Rico had stolen the money, Natasha was busily replaying over and over. He’d placed stolen money in an offshore bank account in her name! One of her hands twisted down to cover her mouth as the nausea returned with a vengeance. In the dragging silence blanketing the space separating them she could feel Leo Christakis’s ice-cold anger and blistering contempt beating over her in waves.

If he’d made this declaration yesterday, she would not have believed him. But now, with everything else she’d been forced to look at today, Natasha didn’t even see a chink of a question glimmering in the nightmare her mind had become as to whether there had been some kind of mistake.

Everything about Rico had been a lie from start to finish. The way he’d used his looks and his charm and his fabulous blinding-white smile to lure her to him, the way he’d poured soft words of love over her too-susceptible head and refused to make love to her because he wanted to protect her innocence, while all the time he’d been cynically planning to turn her into a thief!

Pulling her fingers away from her mouth, ‘I’ll give you the money back just as soon as I can access it,’ she promised.

‘Sure you will,’ Leo confirmed. ‘Once you have recovered your composure, we will go and see to it straight away.’

That brought her face up, whiter than white now so her eyes stood out bluer than blue. ‘But you don’t understand. I can’t touch it yet.’

‘Don’t play the broken doll with me next, Natasha,’ Leo bit out impatiently. ‘It won’t alter the fact that you are going to give me my money back now—today.’

‘But I can’t!’ Anxiety shot her quivering to her feet. ‘I can’t touch it until the day before I was supposed to be marrying Rico! He said it was a tax loophole he’d discovered—that you had told him about! He said we had to lock the money up under my name in an offshore account until end of business the day before we marry, then transfer it to another account in our m-married name!’

Leo suddenly exploded spectacularly. ‘I do not appreciate you trying to involve my name in your filthy scam!’ he bit out at her furiously, ‘and telling me stupid lies about access to the money is not going to get you out of trouble, Miss Moyles! So cough up the cash or watch me call the damn police!’

In a state of nerve-numbing terror, Natasha backed away as he took two long strides towards her with a murderous expression clamped to his face. The backs of her legs hit the chair she’d just vacated and she toppled back into it. He came to stand over her as he’d done in the bedroom, only this time Natasha put up her hands in an instinctive need to keep him at bay.

Watching her cower in front of him sent Leo into an even bigger rage. ‘I don’t hit women,’ he rasped, then turned on his heel and walked away—right out of the room.

The police—he’s going to call the police! Out of her mind with fear now, Natasha scrambled upright and chased after him, terrified of going anywhere near him but even more terrified of what would happen if she didn’t stop him from carrying out his threat! He’d crossed the hall and entered a room opposite, which turned out to be a book-lined study.

Coming to a jerky halt in the doorway, she stared as he strode up to the desk and picked up the phone.

Panic sent her heart into overdrive. ‘Leo, please…’ The pleading quaver in her voice made him go still, wide shoulders taut. ‘You have got to believe me,’ she begged him. ‘I didn’t know the money was stolen! Rico conned me into banking it for him as much as he conned you out of it in the first place!’

The last part didn’t go down too well because he began stabbing numbers into the telephone with a grim resolve that sent Natasha flying across the room to grab hold of his arm.

Warm, hard muscles bunched beneath her clutching fingers, anger and rejection pouring into his muscular frame. ‘He s-said it was to ensure our f-future,’ she rushed on unsteadily, ‘He said it was a bequeath to him from your father you had been holding in trust! He s-said you…’

‘Wanted to see the back of him so badly I was prepared to break the law to do it?’ Leo suggested when her scramble of words dried up.

‘Something like that,’ Natasha admitted. Then— Oh, dear God, what had she let Rico do to her? ‘Now you are telling me he lied, which means he lied to me about absolutely everything and I—’

The phone went down. Leo turned on her so suddenly Natasha was given no chance to react before she found herself trapped in his arms. His mouth arrived. It took hers with an angry heat that offered nothing but punishment yet she responded—responded to him like a crazy person, clinging and kissing him back as if she’d die if she didn’t! When he pulled away again she was limp with shock at her own dizzying loss of control!